wooden brooders work fine for us, please be sure to give them lots of room to get away from the heat!!! Also be very careful regarding placement of heat lamp - for fire safety. There are some that use the plastic tote type of brooders, I worry abit with those regarding splay legs possibility but it seems to work for folks! Maybe someone will explain how they set those up!

If you can find a good sale on a GQF brooder they are wonderful but full price very expensive!!!! Hope I've helped some! Happy new Years!

I absolutely love that brooder thread. I have been pouring over all 139(!) pages of it while I piece together a brooder for chicks I plan on geting mid-March (when the feed store gets them in). I'm planning on using a 45-gallon plastic tote (off brand from Wal-Mart, but similar to the big Rubbermaid ones). I particularly like the one I got because it has wheels on it and I'll be able to take them out into the yard brooder and all when they get big enough to start playing outside. I'm still debating lid options, whether to make one completely out of hardware cloth or cut half of the original lid off and cover that half with the hardware cloth, but over all it'll make clean up for 3 chickies easier on me.

As for the splayed leg concern, I'm going to use paper towels on the bottom, followed by litter (pine shavings) after the reccommended 3-7 days (it varies by who you ask, lol).

Like everyone else says...look at that thread and make a frankenbrooder! There aren't really any set-in-stone directions to follow, but from what I gather it's pretty much a "do what suits you & the number of chicks you're gonna have" type situation. For me and my planned #, the single tote will work great.